03 - God King (43 page)

Wolfgart drew his heavy two-handed sword from his shoulder scabbard. The
weapon was unwieldy to use from the back of a horse, but Wolfgart would sooner
be defenceless than go into battle without such a blade. Wenyld held the banner
high, gripping onto his horse with his thighs and stirrups as he swung the
spiked ball of a great morning star in looping arcs.

Sigmar picked out the dead man he would slay, an eyeless corpse with thin,
wasted arms hanging limply at its sides. His steed whinnied in fear and he
lifted his hammer high.

“For Ulric!” shouted Sigmar, urging his horse to greater speed. “For the
Empire!”

Ghal-Maraz slammed down and broke the corpse in two as the Unberogen cavalry
struck the shambling mass of the dead in a deafening crash of iron and bone. The
first ranks of the dead simply disintegrated as the unstoppable mass of horsemen
crushed them with the speed and weight of their charge. Hundreds were trampled
and broken apart in moments, hammers and swords and axes hacking a bloody path
through the undead.

Sigmar kicked a dead man in the face, caving in the bone of his skull and
backhanding his hammer into the chest of another. Ribs splintered and rotten
meat sprayed from the impact. Emerald-lit eyes dulled as the corpse fell, but
Sigmar was riding onward before the body had even fallen. Claws tore at his
horse and his legs, but his armour was impervious to the broken nails and bony
fingertips of the dead. The Great Hall Guard were the very best of the
Unberogen, and these wretched specimens could not hope to halt their advance.

“Keep pushing!” shouted Sigmar. “If we stop we are lost!”

Wenyld’s morning star battered the dead from his path as he sought to keep up
with Sigmar, and Wolfgart’s sword clove living corpses in two with every blow.
Sigmar’s horse kicked out as he drove it onwards, iron-shod hooves breaking
skulls and shattering rib cages as it fought as hard as its rider.

With Sigmar at their head, the Unberogen punched through the ranks of the
corpse warriors, but this had been but a taster for the battle to come. These
were the chaff of the dead, and served only to slow Sigmar’s charge. The Great
Hall Guard hacked, bludgeoned and sliced through the wall of corpses, punching
through to the army beyond, where ranked up skeletal warriors marched towards
them with spears lowered and shields locked together.

* * *

Alfgeir marvelled as his new sword cut through the necks of two dead men with
flawless ease. It was half as light as he would have expected, yet it was
perfectly balanced for his reach and strength. Wherever he swung the sword, it
connected with the most vulnerable portion of his enemy, and he had left two
score headless corpses in his wake. Its edge was keen beyond imagining and not a
trace of grave dirt or blood befouled its surface.

Govannon had presented the sword to him as they gathered to hear Sigmar’s
words at the Oathstone. Together with Masters Holtwine and Alaric, Govannon had
handed him the blade, hilt first, and apologised for the lack of a case.

Alfgeir had been speechless, overcome with gratitude that the smith had
actually managed to fulfil his promise and finish the blade before the first
fall of snow.

“If I live through this battle, I will commission a sword case from Master
Holtwine,” he’d said.

“It will be my finest work,” Holtwine had said.

It was a sword of heroes, a blade that never failed to find its mark and
clove to the very heart of its victim. Beyond the works of the dwarfs, no man
had wielded a finer weapon. Too fine a blade to belong to one man alone; this
would be the blade of the Marshal of the Reik for evermore.

Alfgeir fought with the skill and strength of a man half his age or less,
showing the younger warriors how to fight like a true Unberogen. His two hundred
knights fought just as hard, seeking to earn his favour with their faith and
fury. While Sigmar’s cavalry punched through the centre of the undead towards
the necromancer, Alfgeir’s riders angled their course towards the dead marching
along the northern fork of the river.

Behind Alfgeir, Orvin and his son, Teon, fought the dead with crushing blows
from their heavy broadswords.

Orvin was a man quick to anger, with a temper that had made him few friends
in peacetime, but which served him well in battle. His son wore an old bronze
helmet with a white, horsehair plume. It was dented on one side from a blow
struck more than forty years ago, and Alfgeir remembered the boy’s grandfather
wearing the helm. The dent had come from the axe blow that had panned in his
skull. Alfgeir hoped the grandson would have better luck with it.

Orvin carried the white gold banner Sigmar had presented to Alfgeir upon his
coronation as Emperor, and though no words had ever been spoken to make it so,
it had become a kind of unofficial talisman for the Great Hall Guard. His
warriors fought all the harder when it flew above them, so Alfgeir was happy for
them to count it as their own.

Alfgeir chopped the arms from a corpse seeking to drag him from his saddle
and pushed his mount through the press of crushing bodies. The banner flew
proudly above the knights, a beacon of light for his warriors to rally around.
Though fear of this foe threatened to overcome every one of them, none would
falter while the white and gold banner flew. Wolfskin cloaks streamed at their
backs as they broke through the shambling dead and came face to face with rank
after rank of the warriors formed from bone and iron.

“Onwards!” cried Alfgeir, urging his steed onwards. “For Sigmar and the
Empire!”

Another wolf howled as it was crushed beneath the iron-rimmed wheels of
Maedbh’s chariot. Its remains rotted in an instant, and Ulrike loosed an arrow
through the jaws of another beast as it leapt towards them. Beside her, Cuthwin
loosed with calm precision, each shaft slicing home into the body of a wolf.

“Keen eyes!” shouted Maedbh, proud to have her daughter as her spear bearer
and glad to have a warrior as cool-tempered as Cuthwin next to her.

After the terror of their first battles together, Maedbh had made peace with
Ulrike riding to war. Wolfgart appeared to have done likewise, though she knew
neither of them would ever lose their fear of her going beyond their protection.
They knew the dangers that lurked everywhere in the world, but with this
invasion of the dead there were few mortals who did not. She wished she could
have fought this foe alongside her husband, but the back of a chariot was no
place for someone unschooled in such a demanding form of warfare.

A dozen chariots, all that had survived the battle at the river, followed
Queen Freya as she led the charge towards the rabid packs of death wolves and
their disgusting companions. Now fitted with spinning iron blades at their hubs,
the Asoborn chariots had already torn through scores of the undead wolves,
slicing them and their ghoulish brethren apart. The Queen’s Eagles and hundreds
of Asoborn warriors, their skin painted in the manner of the ancient queens and
their hair stiffened with resin, followed in the wake of the chariots.

Maedbh hauled on the reins, sweeping her chariot in a sharp turn as a pack of
pallid-skinned flesheaters ran towards her. They ran with loping, bandy-legged
strides, hissing as they clawed at her chariot. Ulrike put an arrow through the
nearest creature’s eye, and Cuthwin put another through the throat of the one
behind it. Maedbh swept up her spear and slashed it around in a wide arc,
opening the top of one of the hideous cannibals’ skulls.

Freya loosed an ululating Asoborn war shout and climbed onto the upper lip of
her chariot’s armoured frame with her ancient broadsword unsheathed. Maedbh’s
heart swelled with pride to see her queen fight, a fiery goddess of war sent
from the violent times before the Empire, when none dared to travel in Asoborn
lands for fear of the warrior women said to dwell there with sharp knives and
cruel hearts. Sigulf steered the chariot with great skill, and Fridleifr killed
wolf and cannibal with graceful sweeps and thrusts of his spear.

“Mother!” shouted Ulrike.

Maedbh saw the flesheater too late and felt its claws slash down her back in
lines of fire. She cried out in pain as it vaulted into the chariot. Keeping one
hand on the reins, Maedbh slammed her elbow into its fanged jaw. Ulrike hammered
her knife up and under its ribs. It squealed horribly as it died, and Cuthwin
kicked it from the back of the chariot.

“Are you hurt?” asked Ulrike.

Maedbh couldn’t answer. Already she could feel filth from the creature’s
claws entering her body and bit the inside of her mouth bloody against the pain.
Her flesh burned where she had been cut and her side was sticky with fresh
blood, but Maedbh was Asoborn and this pain was nothing to one who had given
birth.

“I’m fine,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she snapped, harsher than she meant to. “Watch our backs…”

Ulrike nodded, and Maedbh turned back to the fighting ahead of them.

They had cut deep into the swirling mass of wolves and flesheaters, and the
hideous monsters fought all around them as the Asoborn infantry caught up with
the slowed chariots. To anyone but an Asoborn there was no easily discernable
shape to this battle, just a confused mass of circling chariots and intertwined
warriors on foot, but Maedbh knew better. She saw how close they were to being
overrun. Freya should command them to withdraw, reform and charge again, but
Maedbh knew the queen would never give that order.

Maedbh looked over at Freya’s chariot, so proud to be a servant of this
magnificent woman and glad the gods had granted her this last chance to fight
alongside her. She turned her chariot around, cutting the throat of a wolf with
her wheel blades and looked to see where the queen was heading.

Maedbh saw the danger before Sigulf. Years spent anticipating threats to a
chariot had given her a preternatural sense for when to charge and when to
evade. She saw the enormous wolf, twice as large as its brethren, as the exposed
muscles on its powerful back legs bunched and hurled it through the air.

“My queen!” she screamed, but it was too late.

The giant wolf’s forepaws smashed through the chariot’s armour as though it
was dead wood. Freya flew through the air as the chariot flipped onto its side,
dragging the horses down with screams of pain as their legs shattered. The queen
landed hard, cracking her skull against a rock, and lay still. Sigulf vanished
amid the wreckage, but Maedbh saw Fridleifr thrown clear, the boy rolling as he
hit the ground and coming to his feet like a tumbler.

“Asoborns!” ordered Maedbh. “To the queen!”

The flesheaters surrounded the fallen queen as Maedbh whipped the reins and
drove her horses on. Arrows flew from Ulrike and Cuthwin’s bows as hurled
javelins skewered yet more wolves and eaters of the dead. Hundreds more pressed
in, scenting easy meat and knowing on some primal level that they had the chance
to earn their master’s favour with this prey.

Leodan’s warriors wheeled expertly around the advancing blocks of Unberogen
infantry, feeling the ground grow soft beneath their horses’ feet. This close to
the river, the ground was already muddy, but the cold rain was in danger of
turning it into a quagmire. The Red Scythes were the elite cavalry of the
Taleuten kings, and though they owed fealty to the Emperor, it felt wrong riding
into battle without Count Krugar in their midst.

The mass of dead opposing them was a limping, shuffling horde of corpses,
unworthy of a blade, and without skill. Yet the sheer number of them, their
hunger and their mindless aggression, could drag even the noblest warrior to his
doom. Leodan tried to keep that in mind as he rode towards them with his lance
lowered.

He kicked his spurs back, driving his horse to charging speed, and his riders
followed suit, charging in a disciplined line. To maintain cohesion in such
terrain and weather was nothing short of miraculous, but the Taleutens had been
masters of mounted warfare since before their earliest ancestors had been driven
across the eastern mountains.

“Strike fast and ride them down!” he shouted, lowering his lance and aiming
it towards the chest of a dead man with a jawbone sagging on one rotten sinew.
It was a waste to use lances on such dregs, but it wasn’t as though they could
sling them for later use.

The Red Scythes slammed into the corpses with a wet slap of hard wood on
bloated meat. Leodan’s lance punched his target into the air, ripping open its
chest and splintering apart with the impact. His steed slammed through the press
of bodies behind the dead man, trampling them to pulp beneath its weight. In a
matter of seconds, Leodan was ten deep in the mass of enemy warriors. He dropped
the broken lance and unsheathed his curved cavalry sabre, slashing it through
the throat of a dead man clawing at his horse’s face.

He slashed left and right as the dead pressed in, cutting off heads and
lopping off rotten limbs held on by little more than glutinous tendons and
scraps of gristly cartilage. His blade hewed dead flesh with ease, and his horse
crashed bones with every kick. His warriors were unstoppable, riding through the
mass of undead as though they were nothing more than a fleshy annoyance. The
blood thundered in his ears as he destroyed these vile corpses. To ride into
battle like this was to be a god, to tower over the enemy and slay them with
impunity.

Leodan could imagine nothing worse than fighting on foot.

“Ulric damn you all!” whooped Leodan as the mass of corpses thinned and he
knew they had broken through. This was the golden dream of every cavalryman, to
break through the line before wheeling around to smash into the flanks and rear
of the enemy army. He hauled on the reins and punched the air twice. Sheets of
rain and the bleak darkness hid what lay beyond, but Leodan had no intention of
continuing eastwards.